Maksimilian Voloshin

Faces and Masks

When one happens to see works from the French theatre on the Russian stage, then no matter how well they are produced, translated, and played, a tormenting feeling of deep and inescapable disharmony always remains .

No French play can slip into the forms of the Russian stage so that these forms fit it completely, like a case for a geodesic instrument, the way they fit Gogol's, Ostrovsky's and Chekhov's plays.

Whereas the Russian stage finds authentic and well-defined forms for the German Hauptmann, for the Belgian Maeterlinck, and for the Pole Przybyszewski, at times even more successfully than the stages of their homelands, the least complex French comedies, which enjoy wild success in Paris, lose their lustre and wither; their witticisms fall flat and their subtleties seem banal.

The very same thing happens when a French theatre attempts to put on a Russian play or a German one. The productions of Hauptmann and Tolstoy in the theatre of Antoine ¹, despite all the efforts of this talented director and the relative elasticity of the material he had available, were complete failures. And in these failures one senses not an accidental, conceptual error but a deeply rooted historical impossibility.

The French theatre is a musical instrument, organically formed and therefore extremely complex, very precise, and not at all flexible. It corresponds so mathematically precisely to the style of French drama that it cannot submit and bend to the forms of a foreign art. And, because of the strength of its age-old past, it bends and in its own fashion reshapes works of newly arrived art.

A true national art cannot be pliable and elastic. Changes are made to it from the inside and come to the surface with difficulty and slowly. One can explain our extremely nervous, anxious, and whimsical searches for new scenic forms only by the impoverishment of Russian drama, which after Chekhov has created nothing that is new.

The French theatre, on the other hand, is truly national and indissolubly tied to the forms of its stage, as a mollusk is to the ribs of its shell.

French fashionable plays, created with such unparalleled ease by witty Parisian dramatists, are refined whimsical flowers, which can bloom only in one spot on the globe and no other. They need the cramped, slightly shabby, but brightly illuminated hall of the theatre, beyond whose walls the idle, well-dressed crowd of the grand boulevards murmurs. They need that refined understanding together with the naive perceptiveness that makes the Parisian such a grateful spectator of all kinds of spectacles.

If the spectator lacks completely the spontaneous, creative power of an imagination that is perceptive and can generalize, then no matter how great the stature of the author and the actors, the dream vision, which is the only reality generated by the scenic action, can not arise.

As the character and the growth of a plant are wholly regulated by the soil and climate of the location in which it grows, so the character of the theatre depends wholly on the spectator.

Muscovites, who in comparison with the inhabitants of St. Petersburg have an expansive and naive character, slightly Eastern and slightly Southern, offer an incomparably more worthwhile soil for the creation of theatre. And we see that the theatre of Ostrovsky, just like the theatre of Chekhov, was created in Moscow.

Thus the development and the character of Parisian theatres are almost wholly defined by the characteristics and features of the people of Paris.

Without knowing closely the Parisian, so unconsciously free in his manners in the Southern manner and, at the same time, so severely rigorous and timid in all his moral convictions and theories, it is impossible to understand French comedies, in which free manners are discussed with such openness and, at the same time, the most naive moral theses are defended with such total conviction and incomprehensible passion. Freedom of manners and slavery to morality are what characterize the French of the last century.

Our spiritual shamelessness staggers the French most of all.

Not one Frenchman, of course, defines in this way that disturbing but attractive impression that Russians make on him, but it is true.

That a Russian begins to talk with the first stranger he encounters about what is most important and most intimate, that he questions with such insatiable curiosity and tells about the secret movements of his soul seem to a Frenchman, at one and the same time, as barbaric and savage and attractively shameless as nudity at a public ball.

To the basic traits of the Russian character belongs this irresistible desire to bare oneself open-heartedly before the first person met.

How many people there are who cannot sit in a railway car without beginning to tell a traveling companion about his entire life, revealing the most secret details of stories about his family life and his love life.

One has only to recall all the conversations on trains in Russian literature: the beginning of The Kreutzer Sonata, the first chapter of The Idiot, several scenes from Anna Karenina, and many of the stories by Gleb Uspensky.

And if you were to add the outpourings, always touching on what is most shameful, ignominious, and hidden, that occur in Russian taverns under the influence of drink, then what strikes the French about the Russians becomes absolutely clear, as does why Jules Lemaitre, analyzing Ostrovsky's The Thunderstorm, wrote the following:

"And what happened later you can well imagine, since in Russia every husband who has suffocated his child (The Power of Darkness), every student who has killed a pawnbroker (Crime and Punishment), and every wife who has been unfaithful to her husband (The Thunderstorm) awaits only the appropriate moment, coming out onto the public square, to fall on one's knees and tell everyone about one's crime."

This daring generalization by Jules Lemaître ceases to look naive, if one penetrates more deeply and imagines more broadly the basic features of the French spirit, so diametrically opposed to the Slavic spirit.

We are ashamed of our gestures and actions; we fear that they look unexpected and inexplicable to those around us. And therefore we attempt as soon as possible to let observers into their inner meaning.

Whereas the French, being only a little abashed by that which relates to action, deeds, and all forms of life, are insuperably bashful at the uncovering of secret, psychological motives, feelings, and complex internal experiences.

The psychology of the French novelists, despite its refinement, seems shallow, because it is always an analysis of action rather than the internal reasons for it.

The French are wildly bashful of everything that concerns experiences. The most calm and balanced conceal bashfulness behind a mask of society civility; others who are more expansive hide behind a gibe, a joke, behind the French blague.

One can always distinguish people susceptible to a special kind of sensuality and immediacy of impressions by a certain cynicism, a certain superficial flippancy and gaiety, which become, towards the end, a mask that has merged organically with the face.

The French are not ashamed of revealing their body, but in them has been placed an invincible shame of revealing the spirit, which we will never be able to understand fully.

Their spirit therefore is always confined in strict and finished forms, in life as in art, for form is the true clothing of the spirit

In life, however, the bashfulness felt by the spirit leads to the creation of masks.

If, when walking along Parisian streets, you follow for a long time the flow of eyes, faces, and figures, then you soon begin to notice a certain rhythmic repetition of faces.

What had formerly seemed a human face, consummate in its individuality, turns out to be only a general formula, one of the masks of Paris.

In the crowded homes and narrow streets, flooded with light and extended by mirrors, there is so much seething that to look at one another's bare faces, on which everything was written, would be too frightening.

In Paris the face deprived of the mask gives one a shameful feeling of nakedness, and by this nakedness of face the Parisians know foreigners, provincials, and, especially, Russians.

Here live people dressed in masks from head to foot; Parisians put on a face just as they do a dress, a hat, a tie, and gloves.

And the mask is worn not only on the face. It is expressed in a gesture, a voice, a certain turn of phrase, an intonation, a repeated sentence, the tune of a fashionable song, the curve of a waist-in everything that can conceal personality.

But having concealed, it can in part reveal, just like a Parisian woman who, wearing a dress, displays the nakedness of her body; with an adroitly selected and closely fitted skirt she allows us to see the whole line of her hip, leg, and knee.

The mask of a city is the natural consequence of bashfulness and self-preservation.

People, who have gathered here for a life that is stimulating, keen, and gripping, must preserve their living face from prostitution with a mask.

And the mask adheres so tightly to them that they forget about their face.

The formation of the mask-this is a profound moment in the formation of the human face and personality. The mask is the sacred achievement of the spirit's individuality; it is Habeas corpus ², the right of the inviolability of one's intimate feelings, which are concealed behind a generally accepted formula.

The mask and fashion are tightly bound together. The introduction of new masks follows the same complex paths by which a new fashion is introduced.

The introduction of a new fashion involves a complex system that has been developed by an age-old tradition. There are almost no revolutions, violent upheavals, or coups d'état here. Fashion flows slowly, with each season introducing a new detail in the style, carefully altering the combination of colours, and returning periodically to the contemporary scene old models of long ago outworn fashions.

A tailor in Paris must be an archaeologist, an historian, and a painter. He has to work in the Print Gallery of the Bibliotheque Nationale and follow attentively all the colourful novelties and experiments at exhibitions of paintings.

One who is unaware precisely of the historical significance of the paintings of the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists, the colour tones of Gaugin, Cezanne, and Matisse, can not be a tailor for Parisian women.

But the significance of the clothes created by Paris lies not at all in concealing and clothing the body; on the contrary, they only reveal, undress, and outline it. The purpose of the French toilette is to conceal and dress the spirit, but definitely not the body.

And just as new types of clothes are being created in the workshops of the large, fashionable stores. So in precisely the same way new masks of the spirit, new masks for the face, are being created in the workshops of the theatres with the clandestine collaboration of the dramatist, actor, and costume designer.

For a new human mask to receive the civil right to walk the streets of Paris, it must appear on the stage and be officially established on a poster and in a caricature.

Parisians do not go to the theatre to see the complex, frightening, naked human face woven from the grey spider webs of life, which we, entering the theatre, look for; they go to look at, study, and select new masks.

And nowhere does theatre so correspond with the demands of the audience and nowhere does it merge so completely with its spectators as in Paris.

French dramatists are adroit cutters, learned tailors who do not go beyond the limits of the stage's traditional formulas. In Paris drama and comedy take on the same correctly finished formulas as do tails, a frock-coat, or dinner-jacket. And the dramatic clothes are sewn with amazing skill and perfect craftsmanship according to the model provided by the actor.

The plays written by Rostand and Sardou for Sara Bernhardt and Réjane, by Maurice Donnay for M-lle Brandes, by Jules Renard for Suzanne Deprès, by Willy for Paulaire, and by de Flers and Caillavet for Eva Levalliere are all dresses ordered from a first-class tailor ³.

Only on ancient roots and foundations can all that is truly refined in art grow.

In a French play the entire dramatic action, the intrigue, the denouements, collisions, and situations featuring the lovers have such ancient and petrified roots. This territory is known with such mathematical certainty and precision, and in it all the conceivable combinations of scenic situations have been exhausted.

But the life, the nerves, and the quickening of a play are the new masks of the actors and the infinite variety of a dialogue shot through with snakelike scales, a dialogue which clothes the dead scheme of the play in the vibrant clothing of words and gives the theatre the quiver of life.

In its scenic mechanism the French theatre has almost become a mathematical scheme. But when, in no matter what the art, a series of canonic forms are created, from which imagination has no right to stray, the powers of observation and the depth of vision are increased tenfold.

The narrower the area of choice, the more art is tightly and intimately bound to the life of its time.

Therefore French plays are inseparable from their Parisian spectators and from the cries of the boulevards that murmur beyond the doors of the theatre.

The audience and the actors divide into numberless, kaleidoscopic reflections of each other and create a moment of aesthetic pleasure that, like a legendary flower, can bloom only at a certain nighttime hour, only at a particular place on earth.

It's understandable, therefore, why among the sixty theatres of Paris there is not a single one that would be able to put on Tolstoy, Ibsen, Hauptmann, or Chekhov -- these northern, cruel plays that shamelessly tear the mask from the human face and reveal all its horror.

Also understandable is the profound absurdity of French plays transported to the Russian stage. A dress from a foreign shoulder, reshaped by clumsy and uncomprehending hands, fits badly, like tails on a Hottentot, and only restricts movement.

Even plays performed by French actors in Russia lose their sense, so that they remain not so much incomprehensible as unnecessary to the spectators.

A Russian is organically incapable of understanding that it is not at all shameful to bare one's body on stage, but insurmountably shameful to bare one's soul. And the Russian style of acting on stage with one's whole being, to the ultimate baring of the spirit, would seem to a French spectator as nothing but barbarian shamelessness.

Thus one must take the French theatre in the following manner: it does not descend into any of the inmost recesses of the human heart in search of terrifying secrets, but reflects and creates only new clothes for life and new masks for the spirit.

Behind its external freedom there is a bashfulness, which for us today is still completely incomprehensible, but will someday become imperative. This will happen when we taste the apple of the knowledge of forms and, after that fall, become ashamed of the nakedness of our spirit.

NOTES

The essay translated here appeared first in a collection entitled Teatral'naja Rossija (11 December 1904).

1. Voloshin is referring to the productions of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness and Hauptmann's The Weavers in 1888 and 1893, respectively, at Antoine's Théâtre Libre.
2. The Habeas Corpus Act passed by the English Parliament in 1679 requires that the "body" of a person arrested or deprived of liberty be produced before a court so that the legality of the detention may be determined.
3. For Sarah Bernhardt Rostand wrote La Samaritaine and La Princesse lointaine. Sardou wrote Madame Sans-Gêne for Réjane. Marthe Brandès appeared in Donnay's L'Escalade. Jules Renard created for S. Deprès the play Poil de Carotte, and Willy wrote Clàudine a Paris for Polaire--the play, by the way, was based on a novel that Willy wrote with his then wife Colette. R. Pellene de La Motte-Ango, marquis de Flers and G. A. de Caillavet created a series of plays for Eve Lavalliere, including Miquette et sa mère and Le Roi.

© Ralph Lindheim

© Zahar Davydov

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